“Lot of simple pleasures are very important. Take that window, now. I can sit by it when I’m too stiff to get up and down the stairs, and watch the world. I know every one of the tenants in this building by sight. I know what time they go to work, or not, as the case may be. I know who visits them, and for how long.”
I know you’re lonely, he seemed to be saying. I am, too. If you talk to me I won’t pry for more, and I won’t tell anyone else. I didn’t say anything.
“For example, I know that Mr. Rachmindi is moving out next month. His place is nicer than yours, and not much more a month.”
“I’m happy where I am.”
“Maybe you are, but think about the weather as the winter gets on. You’ll be mewling with cold come January. And his window looks out onto the trees at the back, if that’s what you’ll miss.”
“It’s not that.” He just waited. “It’s…” I stood up, found my sack of bulbs, brought them back. I rolled one onto my palm. “Jonquil. In April that’ll be a flower the color of hot sun on white sand.” I put it on the table and took out another. “Bluebell. Like soft babies’ eyes. Freesias, violets, crocuses, verbena…” They rolled out of the sack like toy trucks. “I took my flat because I can get onto the roof. I’m going to grow these.” Where the squirrels could not get at them. “It will be a place of wild things, natural things. I need them.” A tear dripped onto the lacy brown and beige wrinkles of the bulb in my palm.
Tom Wilson’s papery hands reached out and folded my fingers over the bulb. “Best keep it dry,” he said, and produced a large white handkerchief from somewhere. He watched silently as I wiped my face, then my nose, and put the bulbs back into the bag.
“This garden of yours… Will you invite me up to see it, when it starts to bloom?”
I opened my mouth to say, I’d love to, but you will you get your old bones out onto the roof? and said, instead, “Yes.” If he wanted to see the flowers, we’d find a way.
I spent two hours with Tom Wilson and afterward climbed the stairs to my flat thoughtfully.
When I got in I called Spanner. She answered immediately. “Did you get those changes made on my PIDA?”
“Last night.”
“All of it?” I needed to feel safe from Magyar.
“Everything. You are now a fully three-dimensional paragon of virtue.” She was still in that expansive, good mood. “I was tempted to add a police record, something along the lines of swimming naked in the docks as a protest for, oh, animal rights or something.” She grinned. “But I decided against it.”
I couldn’t help it—I grinned back. She could be so charming when she wanted. “I’m glad to hear it.” Even more glad to hear that the work was done. Now Magyar could check all she liked.
“About that equipment,” she said. “You available late tonight for a meeting? Good. I’ll see you here after work.”
The screen went blank.
The morning of Spanner’s birthday they stayed in bed all day, eating, drinking, sometimes unbuttoning their shirts to make love, sometimes buttoning them again to sit up and talk. Lore told Spanner about Belize, about the Heliconias with their leaves the size of canoe paddies, the Santa Maria pine and black poisonwood; Spanner told her about forests she had seen on the net. While Spanner talked, Lore wondered if she had ever been outside the city. She thought of her visit on her own to the park yesterday, how she had found a hidden corner where no one seemed to go. She had stepped over a formal border, following a squirrel, and found herself among the dark and secret greenery of a classical Victorian shrubbery—bay and laurel and yew. Under the waxy leaves of a rhododendron she had come across a female mallard, its feathers a ruffled mix of tawny browns and beige and cream, asleep with its head under a wing. In the spring, she suspected the shrubbery would glimmer with pearly snowdrops and crocuses the color of March sunshine. Like lemon drops against the black, bitter dirt.
Spanner paused, wine bottle halfway to her mouth. “Are you listening?”
“Yes.” And she was, sort of.
“Good. We’re the same, you and I. We understand each other.”
All Lore understood about Spanner was that whenever Lore reached for her, she wavered and was gone, like the shimmering reflection on the oily surface of the river.
“You know what it’s like. To have someone kill herself. You know how it feels. Because of your sister, your sister…”
“Stella.” It was hard to say her name aloud. Her sister’s suicide was public property. She supposed it had been all over the net. “Who do you know that killed themselves?”
Spanner ignored her. “You know what that’s like. How hard it is to explain to people. You can say, I saw it coming. You can say, It was only a matter of time. You can say, There was nothing I could do. And they don’t believe you. Did you find that?”
“I didn’t know Stella was going to kill herself.”
Spanner squinted at her. “Yes, you did. She was unhappy, wasn’t she?”
Lore nodded because she couldn’t speak. She tried not to think about Stella and why she killed herself, because then she would have to think about Tok, about her father about herself. “Leave some of that wine for me.”
But Spanner was leaning down out of bed, bottom flashing as her shirt rode up to her waist. She seemed to be tugging on something under the. bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Box.” She heaved, and an ancient cardboard box slid out onto the carpet. She got out of bed and sat cross-legged by it. “There’s a picture of my mother in here, somewhere.” Her mother… Spanner scrabbled about in the box, which Lore could not see. She knew better than to try and look.
“Here.” Spanner handed Lore an old-fashioned CD-ROM disk, poked about some more and came up with a flat gray drive case and some cable. She shoved the box back under the bed and stood up. “Bring the wine.”
Lore followed her into the living room.
“I made the drive when I was fifteen,” Spanner said as she plugged it into her system and ran a couple of tests. “Give me the disk. There.”
The first picture that came up on the screen was a dog, an impossibly elegant whippet with a patch of black fur over one eye. “That’s Anne Bonny. My dog, when I was nine. Looks like a pirate, doesn’t she.”
“What happened to her?”
Spanner ignored that. Several pictures whipped by too fast for Lore to follow. She tried to remember if whippets were expensive, what kind of money Spanner’s family might have had.
“My mother.” She had blond hair, lighter than Spanner’s, and her face was thinner, almost hollow. She looked as though she had bird bones; one hard squeeze would crumple her like paper. Lore could not tell how old she was, but she thought she might have been around forty. She was wearing a dress of some kind of silky material, the kind that had been popular on soap operas fifteen years ago.
Lore wanted to know more about her. She was desperate to learn about Spanner. But she knew what kind of questions Spanner would ignore. “Did you take the photograph? Looks like it might have been a new dress.”
“It was. She got it for her birthday. We all clubbed together for it.” Not rich, then. But who did she mean by we? “She said she loved that dress. I looked for it, after she died. I thought I’d keep it, keep something that had meant a lot to her, you know, something that we had had between us. But it wasn’t hanging in her wardrobe. I had to search the whole house. It was in a bag full of rubbish, old tat that was going to go to charity that Christmas. It was all wrinkled. Smelled like it had been in the bag for months. I threw it away.” Spanner held out her hand for the wine bottle, took a long gulp, then wiped her mouth with her hand. “It was then that I realized that everyone lies. About everything. She must have hated that dress, must have been laughing at us all the time she wore it. And then she just left us. Like that. Didn’t even leave a note.” Spanner ejected the disk and hurled it against the east wall so hard that it chipped away a lump of plaster.